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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Characterization Of Swelling Ratio And Water Content Of Hydrogels For Cartilage Engineering Applications, Emily E. Gill, Renay S.-C. Su, Julie C. Liu Aug 2014

Characterization Of Swelling Ratio And Water Content Of Hydrogels For Cartilage Engineering Applications, Emily E. Gill, Renay S.-C. Su, Julie C. Liu

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Due to the high prevalence of arthritis and cartilage-related injuries, tissue engineers are studying ways to grow cartilage tissue replacements. Resilin, an elastomeric protein found in insect cuticles, is known for its extraordinary resilience and elasticity. In previous studies, recombinant resilin-based hydrogels, or cross-linked protein networks, exhibited potential for use in cartilage tissue scaffolds. Our lab successfully developed resilin-based proteins with a sequence based on the mosquito gene and showed that resilin-based hydrogels possess mechanical properties of the same order of magnitude as native articular cartilage. In addition, these mechanical properties can be controlled by changing the protein concentration. To …


Population Balance Modeling Of Conjugation In Enterococcus Faecalis, Jeremy Binagia, Vu Tran, Che-Chi Shu, Doraiswami Ramkrishna Aug 2014

Population Balance Modeling Of Conjugation In Enterococcus Faecalis, Jeremy Binagia, Vu Tran, Che-Chi Shu, Doraiswami Ramkrishna

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

In the bacteria species Enterococcus faecalis, transfer of plasmid pCF10 by conjugation between donor cells that possess sets of genes conferring drug resistance and recipient cells leads to the spread of this resistance in a population. A complex signaling molecule network is responsible for communication between recipient and donor cells. Up to this point, the nature of these signaling molecules has been modeled deterministically from the point of view of an “average” cell. While this view has been cured slightly by stochastic treatments, a model is needed that better accounts for the individual nature of each cell, each cell’s interactions …